Global research and interest in artificial intelligence (AI) have skyrocketed over the past few years. Spurred on by the massive focus of the world of business on the potential of AI to streamline processes and optimize workflows, we're now seeing AI tools and systems integrate into the vast majority of industries. 

Of these industries, we're seeing a major shift in the way that AI is interacting with cybersecurity. Email security in particular is being bolstered by AI technologies, with new tools being able to offer more specific and personalized protection schemes. 

Considering how corporate AI investment has risen since 2016, growing sixfold in the last six years, it's no wonder that email security AI tools are developing so rapidly. In this article, we'll dive into the rise of artificial intelligence and outline exactly how its development is coinciding with a mass movement of businesses and individuals alike to incorporate AI email security tools into their arsenals.

Why Has AI Become So Popular?

As much as it may seem to many that AI has come out of the blue overnight, this is far from the case. Artificial intelligence has been in the works since the 1950s, first being focused on problem-solving calculations and equations. Since the 50s, AI has come a long way. Especially in the last decade, with advances in other technological fields, we've been able to push machine and deep learning into a new era of productivity.

The reason that AI is becoming so popular right now is due to the sheer amount of data we have accessible to us. To formulate an effective pool of knowledge and answer questions, AI must collect a huge quantity of data to process. This data becomes the basis for all of its responses. With advances in cloud computing and storage systems, we can now collect more data than ever.

The improvement in data collection has also coincided with the expansion of the amount of data we produce. Year upon year, we're creating trillions of terabytes of data, with every interaction with the internet producing more data points to collect and process.

With the amount of data available, we can now train AI data models more effectively. From there, businesses have been able to produce several AI-led tools, spanning generative and performative functions. The watershed moment for AI was arguably ChatGPT, which demonstrated the potential that AI tools now offer to a larger public audience.

Since this moment, tools in every industry have begun to spring up. Of course, this has pervaded into the tech-intensive sector of cybersecurity, where experts are using AI to fortify email security and protection techniques. 

How Is AI Used in Email Security?

Email security has been a growing concern over the past few decades. Phishing, one of the primary attacks that are launched over this medium, now eclipses regular emails, with over 3.4 billion spam emails being sent each day. More than ever before, cybersecurity businesses are using AI tools and integrations to strengthen their defenses against spam and malicious intent.

Businesses can use AI to fortify email security in several ways:

• Anomaly Detection - Email providers can use AI tools to monitor the activity of email accounts and their social networks. If an artificial intelligence network notices that one account is sending an impossible quantity of emails, it can conduct further investigations to then determine if these anomalous results are due to a fraud network automating their attacks. By marking email accounts or networks that are likely to be scams, AI tools can make email networks a much more secure sphere.

• Improving Spam Filters - Advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have allowed AI tools to more effectively understand the context of emails. By analyzing email language against a bank of contextual markers and examples, it can more effectively recognize emails that are likely to be spam.

• Monitoring Attachments and URL Links - One of the main parts of email security that can lead to breaches is when an employee downloads an attachment or navigates to a scam site via a link. AI tools can more efficiently comb through emails, check links, and scan attachments to find malicious elements. With this strategy, they can then block emails that contain anything that could put an individual or an organization at risk.

• Threat Intelligence Sharing - Another powerful aspect of AI in email security is the fact that it can continually improve over time. By using machine learning principles, every attack that AI prevets is more information that helps it identify more complex threats in the future. With a network of threat-sharing intelligence tools, different AI and ML networks can share information, helping to build up an impressive defense system against all forms of potential threats.

Email security is a notoriously complex field of cybersecurity, especially considering this is one of the areas where many attacks occur. To prevent as many data breaches or malicious events, cybersecurity businesses around the world are turning to the power and efficiency of AI tools and technology.

Final Thoughts

AI technology is undoubtedly here to stay. AI is already making a huge impact across major sectors like finance, healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. And, considering how accessible these tools are, businesses need to turn to them to overcome the mounting threat. As attackers are also using AI tools to generate malicious scripts and code, the best response is to assume the same technology to mount an effective defense. 

Over the next decade, we'll likely see artificial intelligence's expansion into the cybersecurity sector to an even greater extent. In a few years, AI may form the central framework for all email security tools, providing an ever-evolving approach to the ever-shifting cybersecurity threat.